this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2025
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Would you care to describe how you would implement said system? Because I can't see how that would work technologically
I intentionally was vague because there are many possible existing ways to accomplish each thing I said, and it is up to the phone company to innovate.
The simplest way to keep people from guessing phone numbers is to make them very long and sparse. If an autodialer had to dial 1000 invalid numbers before finding a valid number, it would make the endeavor that much harder. This is just a convenient example because the cryptography equivalent is harder to explain, but you could make contact info so hard to guess that it would be basically impossible.
Probably the easiest way to explain how to keep people from passing contact info is to imagine a two step process like facebook has. If I pass your facebook username to someone else, they don't automatically become your friend. The cryptographic equivalent would involve a chain of trust, but again, harder to explain.
I love cryptography! Technical explanation please.
Literally just use existing standards (STIR/STUN) with some filtering by source network, etc
Still not seeing how it would work. You're dropping random bits of the system and saying it would work but it's too complicated for you to explain, so there's really nothing to discuss.
not op but signal has basically solved this. users are not just randomly accessible by anyone. they can share a long URL that contains an ID, or make a short username they like and pass around to people. and even then the recipient has to accept being contacted by each other user
true that signal now relies on the phone number system for trust and safety, but that's not core to how signal works, it could be replaced if they really wanted.
At that point, you (well, not you per se) are basically suggesting to replace the telephone system with a Signal-esque system. Which would break a billion things in real life, for little to no gain.
any change would break a billion things in real life, so we could at least have a proper replacement.
the problem with signal here is that it's centralized, probably couldn't even handle the load besides other problems. but that's solvable, like look at simplex which is similar